Where were you on 3rd June, 2022?

I have been writing to myself since about 2008 which is when I started making “things to buy someday” lists in the backs of notebooks (or registers as we called them). As my memory serves those lists were mainly riff-raff written around the core of three items: first, an iPod Classic; second, an HTC smartphone; and third, a MacBook. The riff-raff included anything from a backpack to guitar strings - always something rooted in the immediate, nothing significant in the long-term. The iPod, smartphone, and Macbook trinity though, it persisted for years. Though I have owned an HTC smartphone (and about half a dozen others) and am now on my second MacBook Pro, I still haven’t been able to get my hands on an iPod Classic. Maybe someday. ¹

More serious writing to self started happening in 2012, when I finally set up a personal diary-blog on WordPress. The first half of 2013 was when I peaked. I had just crashed out of the college theatre society and had way too much time on my hands. And like your regular tech-inclined nerd I spent that time -

1. attending lectures (in DU?! Bizarre, I know),
2. reading secondhand books,
3. learning how to code in Python (back when Coursera was actually good), and
4. writing about how sad I was because my highschool girlfriend was (temporarily) breaking up with me.

Oh, and somehow I got hooked to Quora and became the 37th most followed Indian writer on it. You can tell how little of a social life I had in summer 2013 from the fact that this was one of my most upvoted blogs/answers on Quora at the time –

For over a decade now, I have kept a log of my thoughts in some written form. This sporadic longform love letter to the ether(net) aka newsletter is the latest avatar but it isn’t the only one. I have a microblog on this website where I record fleeting thotes ². I sometimes jot down quick ideas in Apple Notes or Google Keep. And for the last one year, I have kept a daily bullet journal where I record a summary overview of things that happened that day (e.g. cooked pasta for dinner, went for a run, travelled for an office meeting etc.).

There is no well-defined purpose for all this logging other than the fact that revisiting these notes in the future is invariably an enjoyable experience. I cannot emphasise this enough. I gain invaluable insight every single time I revisit my notes. There is cringe too. So much of it. But even cringe comes with insight into who I was, where I was, what I was feeling, and how all of that connects to where I am today and how I am feeling about it.

Just a little while ago I opened Google Keep. I haven’t used it for a while now so one of the top notes was this from 16th June, 2022:

Sitting in my dingy office cabin, I was doomscrolling to avoid feeling sad when I came across the (inset) tweet and decided to do take charge of my dull office day. I am not sure how you feel about this but let me tell you why this is significant for me. Poonam and I have recognised how important it is to periodically break away from our screens and go “touch some grass”. This could be finding time in the middle of the day for the ten minutes of winter sun we get in our balcony. Or ending a long workday by going for a walk around the neighbourhood and getting a little treat. We’ve been trying to do this since the time we lived in Kolkata.

Seeing this note took me back to the day it happened. I had walked to this Italian restaurant in the mall near my office. I sat looking out of the window and ordered a pasta and a cold coffee. It was good. The meal, the productivity, the realisation that I could actually escape from my windowless sarkari office cubicle every now and then (within a limited radius) to go decompress. It was a really important moment. In the winter of that year, when I was being driven to immense annoyance by the sarkari babu who controlled my life, I would routinely leave the office for a little while to take an afternoon stroll through Salt Lake. One time I watched a school football game. Another time I ate a vada pav. It would always rejuvenate me or at least temporarily pacify me. None of it would have happened if I had never gone to the mall on that day.

And I did not remember it. At least not like this. I had a vague recollection of “that one time I did that thing” but I did not remember that this had happened in June 2022, which means that this was one of the first, if not the first, times that I plugged out of the matrix to go touch grass. It leaves me with a warm fuzzy feeling in my heart. The context of hindsight makes the ordinary remarkable.

And if that’s not enough, look at this one:

Three months and some days into meeting Poonam, I was already writing about marrying her. Uff! How sweet.

Romantic delinquency aside, pay attention to the other things in the note: Work? Easy. Family? Well. Friends? Happy. Health? Very good. “All things considered, I am hands down living the best phase of my life so far."

The past few weeks have been hectic. From allergic reactions to incessant travelling, life has been a bit of a blur. Not enough grounding moments, very little grass-touching. Nonetheless, reading that the 2022-version of me felt that that was “hands down the best phase of my life so far” is like injecting the crisp fizz of a canned Diet Coke™ straight into my skull.³ It makes me feel so so good.

Life has only gotten better since June 2022. In every possible way. If someone had told me in June 2022 that in two years’ time my life was going to be the way it is today, I would have lost my mind. Here I thought what I already have is the best and you’re telling me that it is going to get even better?! Better than the best even? Woof. Sign me up for that joyride.

With this realisation, how can I possibly continue to feel stressed or overwhelmed about the present! I am filled with immense gratitude. Not in a celebrity influencer wrist tattoo kind of way. ⁴ In a real, perspective-shifting, cannot thank my stars enough kind of way.

So you tell me. Do you remember where you were on 3rd June, 2022? What was going on in your life at that time? Were you healthier? Happier? Wealthier? Wiser? And in contrast to that time, how do you feel today? I sure hope you get the same feeling as I do.

Regardless, hit me up. I’d love to chat. Email/text as always.

Don’t forget what the good man Mr. Kurt Vonnegut wrote – if this isn’t nice, what is?

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